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“You always have time for what matters.”

“I have work.”

“Work can wait.” Marian rose, gathering her skirts, and the feathers on her hat swayed. At the door she stopped, and he saw her hand tighten on the frame. “Whatever is keeping you shut up in this room, Anthony, whatever is making you look like that... if there is a way to mend it so that everyone comes out of it happy in the end, then do it. Make the time. I should like to live long enough to see it.”

Anthony smiled in response, and looked away.

Then the door closed behind her, and the study was silent.

Anthony sat without moving. The cat had settled on the hearthrug, and the fire popped. He thought of Leonora’s face the last time he saw her, and he thought of what he had not told her.

He had not told her what Hester said. Not everything. He had given her the housekeeper’s kind words and the small details, the hard worker, the one who cared for the daughter she wanted to reunite with one day.

However, he had left out the part that mattered. The part that someone had been hunting Rose. A man who followed her from house to house, who made her run, who had very probably been the reason she died in that strange, unexplained way, and somewhere in London, that same man might well still be a threat to Leonora.

He had kept it from Leonora because she was grieving, and because he would not hand her a new fear until he had something solid to set beside it. Two men were working for him now. Neither had come back with a name. Until one did, the danger was only a shape in the dark, and he had not wished her to carry a shape in the dark.

So he carried it. He had been carrying it alone since the afternoon in the library, and it was getting heavier. From the moment Leonora said she was leaving, he had wanted a trusted man near her, but she had refused, and he had given his word that he would not post one. He had meant it when he said it.

A few days later now and he could hardly keep to it. Every hour she was out of his sight with no one near her, he pictured a stranger on the road, or a carriage that turned somewhere it should not. He could not work, he could not sleep, and the men he had hired to find out who had hunted Rose could not move any faster for his worrying.

Marian’s words came back to him. Make the time. Mend it, so that everyone is happy at the end. He could see only one way to do that. The investigators needed time to find the truth, and he needed a clear head to wait for it. He would have neither while he lay awake wondering whether she was safe. If he knew someone was watching over her, even from a distance, he could put that fear aside and leave the rest to the work.

He stood then. His chair scraped, and the cat looked up. He crossed to the bell pull and rang it once, hard.

The butler appeared within a minute. “Your Grace.”

“I want men on Miss Ashcroft.” Anthony said to him. “Four of them, whoever we trust. Two for the day and two for the night, in shifts, so that someone is always near her. They are to follow her wherever she goes. The house, the shops, the park, church. If she leaves the house, they follow. If she stays in, they watch the street.”

The butler inclined his head. “At what distance, Your Grace?”

“Far enough that she never knows.” Anthony paused. “They are not to approach her. They are not to speak to her under any circumstances, and if she should see one of them, he is to say nothing and walk on. They report to me at the end of each shift, in person. If anything alters, a stranger at the door, a change in her habits, they send word at once, whatever the hour.”

“Very well, Your Grace.”

“Choose men who can be quiet and who know how to follow a lady without being seen. I do not want anyone clumsy.” He turned toward the window. “How soon can the first of them be in place?”

“I should not care to send anyone I have not looked over myself, Your Grace. If you will allow me today, I can have every candidate screened by this evening. The best of them will be at his post at first light tomorrow.”

Anthony’s jaw tightened. “Tomorrow, then. At first light.”

“I shall see to it directly.”

When the door had closed, Anthony stood very still. If he knew she was safe, he could think. That was all he needed. That was the only way he would be able to give her the thing she wanted. She would never need to know any of it.

He walked back to the desk and sat, pulled the ledger toward him, and picked up a fresh pen.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“Well, well. Look who has finally found her way down to the morning room.”

Leonora did not turn from the window. She had been curled on the cushioned seat since breakfast with a book open on her knees, and she had not turned a page in an hour. Outside, a gardener’s boy crossed the lawn with a barrow, and she watched him all the way to the far wall as if his errand mattered.

“Good morning, Lady Byron.”

“It is nearly noon.” Lady Byron crossed the room and lowered herself into the chair opposite, arranging her skirts. She was a slight woman, and she still took up more of a room than most women twice her size. “Four days. I counted. Four days that a tray has gone up to your chamber and come back down with the food untouched. I had begun to think I would have to send for the physician, or the vicar, whichever arrived first.”

“I have been resting.”